Training Without Conflict 팟캐스트 에피소드 4: Dr. Ian Dunbar

so yeah i i went i started working there i worked for the guide dogs for the blinding sound of fail and and then it was just the commuting and everything it was too much so then then i changed and i started working at the spca richard of mencino was still the director at the time that i started but um at the end he i don't know if he retired or what happened but there were some changes that that's when the kind of quite a bit of changes happen at spca when he retired yeah then the director came from um hubert's in new jersey and he took over i think but you know rich avencino was there for years and made it a very uh unique um and for me fun place to work back then i mean the hearing dog program and that was the first of its kind of like raising money for a program and they did a lot of that you know rather than saying oh please give us money for unwanted dogs they would pick a program like food for dogs living with people you know with disabilities or with aids and and there's a lot of really cool stuff yeah one of the the really interesting things now it's uh it's a common now now it's you know it's almost very trendy and every shelters that know how to make money they you know they have the same model but at that time when he started probably nobody even believed that people will spend so much money and like to see dogs in in that kind of environment and and like he had a vision that was completely new at the time and he made it happen they were only about back then about a half a dozen humane societies around the country that were really progressive like in boston in wisconsin and a couple in uh obviously you know peninsula humane san francisco and then um marin humane and they were really doing good stuff from a behavior viewpoint but they didn't call it behavior they called it education and then it was actually marine humane society this is a little known fact that the very first off-leash puppy class in the world was taught at marin humane society yeah they they asked me to come up with a you know really unique and different way to train dogs and i did and then it was pat campy and what was the other lady's name it was trish trish something right i can't remember you're talking it's the the the one in nevada yes that's right yeah i think it's a trish but i cannot remember her last name at the moment either but they they got 20 puppets and they said ian this won't work we're going to let them off leash i said yeah and they said oh wait wait wait can you train it so i said yes i commuted you know across the bridge and taught that puppy class and then i thought you know that was fun and i found it serious i thought that's

what i want to do in my life it was just so much fun yes you know training was always dealing with problems people wouldn't go to class till they had a problem but now we got them at three months and i could tell you well this is what's going to happen and i'll tell you when i see it beginning happening here like first week in class i would say i can now name three dogs who are gonna bite their family members when they're eight months old it's so obvious you know the dog won't approach it backs up it ducks its head and you would locate the problem and just resolve it so fast and it was safe and it was fun you know it was a it's one of probably one of the most fun things i've ever done in my life apart from the k-9 games um but the puppy classes are just they're brilliant it was a revolution for sure it was like oh well i mean people wouldn't even think to to do anything with puppies so let them grow up or let them do this and and as you say yeah eventually we can have some serious problems and and you can yeah and then people would say oh it's in the breed or he'll grow out of it you know no he won't you know this will get worse and worse you know your pup is nibbling on your carpet your eight-month-old dog will destroy your house and anyway it was fun so with the puppies since we are talking about this how how much what is your take on environment versus genetics that old but always very interesting debate well you know i have three answers to that question you know like if i were talking to a breeder i would say they said should i breed this dog i would ask them questions like how long did his great-great-grandparents live for let's breed a dog that has longevity and it's you know it's forebears um have you ever had a behavior problem with it has it ever been sick and usually with most breeders i say no i wouldn't breed that dog so when it comes to picking the dog to breed prior to conception i am an absolute ruthless geneticist as soon as that sperm goes into that egg i say well forget jeans the gene teams had its chance everything now comes down to behavior and training and socialization and so that's why people think i'm like a rabid you know socializing environmentalists are not unrealistic genes before we breed after we breed socialization my answer to say students when i i lectured at cal um would probably take 10 weeks in the course they're both important and they they intertwine and so you can't take genes on their own you like let's say we had two litters let's pick um bull terriers and golden retrievers and we say well bull terriers act like bull terriers because they were bred from bull terriers

and golden retrievers are saying i said yeah but bull terriers had a bull terrier mum and bull terrier littermates so the first thing you've got to test is a cross fostering experiment we put one golden in the bull terrier letter where quickly he has to learn put up or shut up you know it's a different type of play here then we put a bull terrier in the golden litter and in a while he's like on his back and smoking dope and wagging his tail and he's calm and waggy you know so we have to check what is the effect of the social environment well of course the biggest aspect of any social environment is the owner why because they are the trainer and educator they are specifically changing the environment to change the dog and i think a lot of why sirius became famous was in my research i realized that you could change temperament overnight we saw this a couple of times watching our puppies grow up and so i thought wow you know breeders or new puppy owners be really interested to know this stuff so when i started serious i said yeah it's about managed training but also behavior training and temperament training we don't test temperament we test it and train it and try and mold it and change it so if a pup is too uppity we'll calm him down if he's too nervous we build his confidence and i found with puppies temperament is comparatively easy to mold because back then in the dog fancy they wouldn't even think of training a dog till it was six months or a year old right you know especially if it were a working dog or going to be a competitive dog and so to me they missed the whole time when the brain is incredibly malleable and and that was you know the second reason i came to berkeley i came to work with frank beach to study sexual differentiation in dogs how sex differences and sex develops differently in males and females but also to join the diamond roses fight study on how environment changes brain anatomy and this research fascinated me i discovered it in the mid 67 tell us a little bit about this that that would be interesting to go a little bit it really is and just changing the environment and changing course the social environment you put a rat not just in a cage on his own but with another rat and the number of cells in the brain produce dendrites connections synapses but without that environmental stimulation neonatally and say before three months millions and millions of brain cells die off so that's what's happening here in real time when you pet a dog when he sees a child when he plays with another dog you're forming synapses in the brain and a lot of people think a synapse is oh this cell plugs into this one

no the dendritic spines move you know like an elephant's trunk and the more stimulation you get they waggle then they plug into another cell and you've got a connection and that happens in real time in the same seconds with a short lag time of when you're handling or petting a puppy and so yeah for me everything was about temperament molding or temperament training and um speeding them up slowing them down you know having said that a border collie will always be a border collie an ambassador bassett in the same way a dog will always be a dog so if you want to say well what are the effects of genes on behavior say well it's a dog it's gonna bark chew dig bite wag his tail you know but you can mold that behavior the extent to which he's going to do these doggy things so like reed you have i mean you pick the ultimate um oh ferrari of dogs for a ferrari sport um having said that a ferrari is probably not a good car and now a mini you pick a mini not only is this fast and can accelerate but it can move back and forth okay and the ferrari of dogs would be the german shepherd beautiful dog when it works but they're going to spend a lot of time in the shop because they're so sensitive and tuned to work as a pet dog they can they can be over sensitive and become fearful usually of strangers and so yeah you pick the right dog you know for the sport that's not to say you can't make him better i mean i love when when i look at trainers the trainers i love uh they pick a dog any dog best dog for the sport or worst dog for the sport but saying they're doing agility and they pick a french bulldog or a basset you know instead of a border collie i enjoy both the trainers that take these dogs and make them better yes they don't just rely on the dog's natural skills they refine them and they can turn them on and turn them off like that so that dog can change jobs like we put on a hat right i'm a policeman now now i'm at home drinking a beer and when people can do that with the dog that garners a lot of respect from me and so i i get a lot of joy out of watching the lesser known breeds apart from it being hilarious can you think of anything funnier than the basset doing agility but that that's a lot of the point of it you want people to react when they see your dog competing either going wow or like oh that's so cool it's so funny it's making me smile right now there is a well not right now but let's say in the last five ten years quite a bit of a movement in science i'm sure you you um are aware of uh richard dawkins which is from he had this wonderful book um the selfish gene and then the the other one which i really really

recommend to everybody is the robert plumbing the blueprint that's where the reason of asking environment nature versus nurture that again as you said medieval age question but recent years right now there is a lot of data that comes out that really proves the genetics the genetic predisposition in dogs or humans or anything it's it's far more important and i think robert plumbing was the one that has that one saying that parents mother no parents are important but they don't matter that much meaning that it is very important how somebody is raised in the environment but ultimately what you are programmed with what you come with that's your that's where you're gonna that's your home base and that's where you're gonna end up going if you're left if you are allowed to right and so there were some interesting twin studies i mean that this becomes now so popular to where it was actually i believe it was in england during the world war and a mother leaves kids just just infants newborns a few different places uh orphanages and what happened was um they all got picked up by completely different uh uh people like some some were like very intelligent very accomplished people and some were just middle-class families and to make that story short what ended up they kind of meet by pure accidents in the university eventually and they end up liking the same things and they just pretty much they you know being identical twins raised in different environment not much really change them from being the identical twins which was um almost like really a beginning of of that paying way more attention to the genetic side of of what we come with and understand that you know we can guide and we can control and it's much easier to understand and guide and control what comes naturally genetically than trying to fight against it and try to make something that it's not programmed to be right yeah which is what so many people do with dogs yes um especially for companion dogs all the things it's been bred for they say what you're never going to run and lunch and chase in this town again but that's what it was bred for it's what my great-great-great-great-grandparents did yeah it's um but it is where ultimately i would say um as i said a border collie is the border collie malone was a malinois but socialization training and environment has to be all important because it's all we can do and so i think if um your followers say read my stuff on breeding which we have we have free courses on dunbar academy there's one for breeders you'll think guy this guy is tough yeah i wouldn't breed 90 of the dogs out there if only for longevity i'm sorry you know i've had three

purebred dogs die at seven that's not right and so i would like to live till they're 14. so the first thing i would select for is longevity which if you think about it is the best overall indicator of not just physical health but also behavioral health yes it's a healthy mind body mind of course you know you don't live long if you bite your owner yeah and so i'm pretty tough when it comes to genes but that is just a quick choice to make shall we breed these two dogs and once that's done um everything for me is socialization and training and the effects can be enormous and say let's put it this way the best way i can describe it is say we take a golden retriever and malamute and we either socialize and train them or we don't there will always be that same difference on any behavioral variable between goldens and malamutes but that this difference but the difference between are you not socialized and trained or you are is the difference between the pavement and the at top of the empire state building that's the way i look on it you'll always have that genetic difference it'll never be overridden but the difference that comes from socialization and training and quite simple things so you could take a highly trained obedience dog but you didn't quite socialize him properly so as he's performing a lot of people start clapping and he freaks and years and years of training just go down the toilet so to me always the dog's temperament comes first as the solid foundation the terra firma that we build the foundation on which for me would be sit down and stand stays on top of that would put centripetal attraction does the dog want to be close to you and on that will we build all the fancy stuff that we're going to do whether it's snazzy healing or uh hunting and i find a lot of people in working professions they have a dog that doesn't have basics and so like hunting dogs how many of them you know don't have a recall right it's ridiculous you know you never put a recall on your puppy because they don't i remember a lady was interviewed in england on tv she'd won many international hunting competitions with her golden and the producer of my tv program then interviewed her and said what do you think of this new english chap who's teaching these off-leash puppy classes you know what do you think says oh well you know number one training is not a game you know you can't possibly train a doctor six months to a year old okay so it is serious now as she's saying this to the camera she's sitting on the floor at her home with a pheasant wing in her hand teaching a puppy to retrieve the festival as she's saying you can't play train puppies

she's play training a puppy and that's probably why she won all the trials and all her competition couldn't complete it because she kept saying i would never train a puppy but she did and she was you know so you know it's oh it's it no question it's really especially today it would be a shame not to just to wait for a puppy to grow up and and not to do anything that would be just wrong like really that would be um i always give those examples of um you know i'm coming eastern europe bulgaria back in the communism time like in romania the orphanages there were just so many kids like i sometimes even in my classes have the show those videos on youtube of those kids that had zero interaction with no no no parents no not conversation no play which play is essential to for you know like if you don't think about training forget training but not to play with a dog or not to play with a kid at that age you completely will will put a limitation of the brain development i i'm really amazed when you know children or puppies grow up in a really impoverished environment but so many of them somehow cope they get through and i think because of that then people don't think early socialization is so important but what i tell them is yeah that dog is coping he will never be what he could have been you stole that from him when he was a neonate or a very young puppy or baby so you will never be what he could have been but yes the coping mechanisms of the mammalian brain is unbelievable and it can withstand an awful lot of early damage um but it often leaves a lot of scars when people don't do the work when that dog is fearful of people you see that is a self-reinforcing process in the same way that socialization is self-reinforcing like say with crazy labs they'll approach anyone and say hello hello i'm a lab pleased to meet you i love you i love you which means they'll be more likely to do that tomorrow so socialization is continually reinforced but for standoffish puppies they're not socializing today because they're standoffish but i'll tell you what i'll be even more standoffish tomorrow and less likely to socialize so that the fact that dogs can cope and we can manage problems or we put them away when visitors come to a house or we coddle them on leash when they walk but the sad thing is they miss the real joy of life being a dog that you can be walked off leash and you can sniff and you can do have lots of freedoms because the owner has socialized you and basically only have one command that works set you can go a long way with an off leash dog if he just has an emergency sid and no matter what he's doing you can get him back under control

sit then you've got options you could call him because now he's looking at you and he's proven you're in control because he just sat he's being compliant you could do a recall or you could do stay or you could walk up to him or you could run up to him and do the recall yourself because the environment is going downhill so rapidly a bunch of children are running up to him sit i do the recall put him on leash my dog's fine and you know so we can go a long way by just at one emergency command with a socialized dog but when you don't have that so like now i worry so much in covid there's going to be so many eight months 10 month old puppies that are scared of their own shadow and their quality of life is going down the toilet so you know i've got posted a lot of free webinars on neat ways to socialize your puppy during the shutdown with social distancing your simple things like have all your extended family and friends who you want the dog to like as an adult send you a used t-shirt and then we're going to have a zoom and whenever you talk you're going to let the dog sniff the right t-shirt so he can hear the person he can smell and then we praise and give five treats and for the children we give 10 treats and does that work i don't know but i would definitely try it out interesting and then we can socialize you know socially i tell people it's wonderful to teach dogs now instead of being social loons that you walk them and whenever they see another dog they want to run up and greet it and they want to jump on people we now teach dogs the default greeting is no greeting but we set it up we get all our family and friends to come to our house and walk the block clockwise spaced out we're going the other way with our puppy but he's going to meet 20 strangers but we know these strangers and they know what to do so as we approach they stop and we sit our dog then they walk by the default greeting is no greeting occasionally after five laps and a hundred greetings we practice we say to the dog sits there okay say hello and the earth that stranger knows cool the dog and have it sit before petting it and keep it you know we now could actually socialize better trained dogs because of the social distancing an arm's length six foot leash that's a nine foot distance instead of six feet so we can do it if we put our minds to it there are ways to socialize but it's just not being done and we have two hidden problems which i call them adolescent onset surprises separation anxiety and fear of people and why because the dog looks normal in covid times when you're at home with them no what happens when you go to work and the kids go to school

he's left at home alone he will freak but they don't see it now and then the fear of strangers we don't see it because the dogs at home vet doesn't see it till the pups probably about six to eight months old so it it's why i've always for me socialization and training is just everything because it's all we can do now and yes i prefer prevention someone called me out on this day today i was reading one of the comments on a question i answered last week and it says all i ever hear is prevent the problem it's easily preventable easily solved when the animal's young and so i said you know the training protocols are the same even if it's an adult and that's what i do yes it will take longer but it's all we can do and so i i love that quote by i think it's attributed to confucius you know the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago the second best time is now yeah let's start training now and because we can pull them rounds we i've just worked recently with two dogs scared of their own shadow raised in way up north in montana uh they both come round and quickly because we are troubleshooting them every day and is it stressful for them you bet for dogs but day by day gets easier on them we can now introduce them to a stranger in about 30 seconds when they first met me it took about three hours but they've now both been you know one of them about 40 strangers and the other one several hundred and it's getting quicker and quicker and easier and easier each time not as quick as the puppy and puppy class we could have solved this problem week one so we can only do what we can do and the time to do it is now but i find so many people will offer excuses for training without realizing it's an excuse you know will he grow out of it well he was abused when young my view is no he won't grow out of it unless you train him if he's abused by young well that was terrible but let's now get him over that abuse now you know i find so many people don't train they say things like oh he's an afghan or a pet owner says oh he's a malinois and they don't even try to train and it's such a shame i think but i don't get on people's case for that i'm not the sort of trainer i said you shouldn't have got a dog in the first place i find a lot of sort of holier than now trainers out there speaking down to owners and and not helping them if someone comes to me with a dog my job is to advise them how best to train that dog a stupid choice right now not in puppyhood because they've got that silly choice right now so when you have a uh i mean i i hope we agree and in some places where we have the like you would have a genetically weak dog and there is ways to recognize that

and there is no question that training and socialization and just interaction is critical no matter what but there is certain limitations right because they cannot overcome like let let's for example take the sudden loud noises which is a very common part of a test right i um so i mean i've been breeding dogs since late 80s and we breed a lot of dogs i also was in the at the guide dogs very closely very interested in the their program which was yes it was uh by the time i think his name was uh clarence fathenberg he made uh the little puppy testing and and and in his book he actually pathenberger popularized the the work that was done by scott and bar harbor maine so he just wrote it in a way that the average person could understand and of course at san rafael they took that on board totally so in the 50s they were actually pretty advanced in terms of raising the puppies but i find from going back it's not changed that much since the 50s and i think with like the new revolutionary stuff that i've learned about socialization especially neonatal stuff um is it's astronomical on what it can do to a dog whether he has brilliant genes or not and by the way what would i do if a dog i would consider was genetically defective well i would spay or castrate it immediately and i would include in that if a dog required say an elective cesarean to be born yeah i would do the caesarean then i would say maybe we should think of castrating and spaying the entire litter plus the mum yeah you know because veterinary science is for the survival of the individual not for the progressive destruction of the breed so that's how maniacal i am about genes but as a pet i would say well he's castrated so he won't pass these genes on but let's give him the best shot being a pet and if i knew his like lineage in terms of breeds i would say just so you know starting at five months and maximizing at eight months this dog will spook out the sub noises so when he has a neonate and the ears are barely open at two and a half weeks let's subject him to every noise he's likely to hear and including loud noises because they can't hear them too well you know they feel the vibrations hand claps uh balloons popping um you can buy apps for every noise there is let's turn it up to 100 decibels you know let's handle these neonates to you know it is over and over and over let's hit them with it and people who are doing this now um my favorite trainer in the world um is russian she lives in indianapolis and the way she selects her dogs especially bread and all they come from humane society is because the dog she competes with was a little white pit bull

that they found and he mains in in a shelter and it um that did uh very well competing against the military and the police i think she was the only non-military police individual and she came second and everyone said no you really came first but you haven't got a uniform so we couldn't give it to you but the selection is extreme but the way she raises these animals the videos of it um and you you can your your listeners can google her name julie case um and try she had a facebook page and you'll see her socialization videos and you will not believe it what she does with these neonates three weeks old she's got a whole bunch of kindergarten children handling the puppy passing as they clap and sing songs and then they have the room which is the floor is covered in balls and crinkly paper and collapsed garbage cans and seesaws and this is where the puppies are being socialized um imam the number of brain cells which are making dendritic connections and living there compared to living in an apartment it never goes out the brain cells that are dying so when we now look at the means available for so so they i think the military you know cotton on to this but the way they did it was too silly i mean what's it called the military system where yeah yeah that's supers yeah six exercises each one is what 15 seconds long and done in true military fashion vivo repeat this file five times for five seconds you know what have you it was the right idea but not point zero one percent of what you should be doing then neonatal stimulation has an enormous effect on the dog and i call it what i say is my analogy is it gives your dog padding to withstand all the ills that the world is there to all the weird stuff that's going to happen children running up tripping over and head-butting your dog when he's chewing a bow the dog was like been there done that yeah when i was four weeks old and and when they talk about socialization people i don't think really understand what we're talking about because of what they say well you shouldn't do it for more than 20 minutes no i do it till the puppy passes out then he falls asleep for 45 minutes while his brain is making a permanent trace then he wakes up he's ready to go again and if you want to understand i think what is right for dogs and puppies in terms of experience and exercise watch them play to the exhaustion which is what they'll do it's what every litter of puppies does they wake up they yawn they pee they oh they scratch they pee they poop and they find another puppy to bite on and they do it till they're exhausted they go to mom and suckle till they fall asleep they play until exhaustion that's what

we're not doing to puppies we're not socializing to exhaustion or giving them experience to exhaustion you can't do too much with a puppy because you'll just fall asleep it went correct having said that i don't mean to say you frighten the living daylights out of an unsocialized puppy but if you've been doing it since neonate heard neonate hood or since he was a neonate through puppyhood no you can scream at the puppy shout run down fall over and do all this high level socialization you know i got caught out by this right here about three months ago i went in the training room and i tripped every single dog in training spooked i thought oh my word yeah you know we used to do that in puppy class we don't even do it in serious now and exercise and serious puppy training was i do it with the kids i say look here we can play a joke on your parents when i go you know from that children's song a tissue a tissue we all fall down i think in america they say ashes ashes awful when i sneeze i want you all to fall down some of you to go still and others to pretend you're having a fit and it's a joke on your parents and i watch what the puppies do what do the puppets do well the first dog to hit these children are pit bulls followed by labs like as if they're saying it's not my fault it's not my fault like like i'm sorry i'm sorry what happens to the german shepherd he doesn't move he sits next to his own and goes that is a weird response and that's telling you this shepherd is so weirded out by a child falling yet the owner doesn't notice it because the dog remains in a state and you know we just don't know what socialization is anymore puppies and schools is the way to do it you know near litter and neonate should be in every kindergarten class there is then we'd have fewer dog bites especially dogs biting children i know like for me like i i look at it again i i used to believe i wanted to even in that military program and and uh some of those you know neonatal programs and i did quite a few interesting i mean with me it was very easy because i have like again i i have every like all the dogs and the females that i breed they're like at least by now who knows maybe 12 13 generations of dogs that i know that i've bred so i've i i did um there was a time where i was really trying to to see if this because it's so hard to know if if something how do you know if that puppy was sound to begin with and we didn't need to do anything or it was not sound but it actually what we did in that early age truly helped and changed and i there were times early 90s i split leaders in two and i did with some and i didn't with some the ones that like i did not find much

if any difference in development the most change in development i found with the dogs that had a just a more of a normal interaction and when play was involved any form of play that really made them very confident and very uh curious and ready to explore and ready to interact and the ones that did not have a chance to play they were very observant but you can see them always judging always thinking a little bit eventually i i decided to even in in my training program to to stop the like using the cotton balls and tickle them and put them in the cold and i i stopped it just because i never really saw a change and there was a time where i really and eventually i decided that that's such a bad idea but i was there was a moment that i wanted to breed two very unsound dogs like noise sensitivity um just completely always aware of the environment and and we know that it kind of comes in there is some genetic predisposition to that and i i was so close to breed that and see what i can do if i like go just crazy with that early on uh programs of of development and and i never had the guts to do it because it's especially hybrid malinois and when you have malinois that are not sound the problems that you have are different than and labrador that's not sound that's a understatement i think the example you give is um when you talk about to say sound sensitivity if a dog is sound sensitive and that certainly has a genetic component to it because we bred them to be sensitive to sound and to respond to it sometimes going back to the flock other times going out away from the flop to protect it but then we bread them to be sensitive to sound what i have found from puppy classes is we can prevent the dog from becoming over to sound as an adult in a way that will severely change its temperament and behavior because if you think about it reactivity to sound you have totally different dog there say a malinois versus a bloodhound or newfee you know slight sound and your ballet was like and the noof is it hasn't even moved you know and so a tiny genetical physical difference can have a massive effect on um temperament so the way i sort of step back and look at husbandry if you like which is raising and and training first is what is natural what do dogs do at that age in the wild well um neonates not much they wiggle they pee they poop usually require stimulation to do it they don't have many senses but they can smell and feel so that's when i would introduce dogs to strangers one sniff they know you're a stranger and they can feel you so and the feel i would get rid of the

the seven of the thirteen most common bike triggers you know the collar region the two ears the muzzle the four paws the is hugging and looking in their eyes i would start looking in a rottweiler's eyes before his eyes have opened why wait till they're four weeks old when you can do it at three and a half weeks he's like is that a human face and i'm looking in his eyes and puffing in him you'll you know smell my breath and all that stuff so there's one way to look at it what is natural in the wild if the dog will left her its own devices how much would it play how long would it play what would it do well it would do everything to develop social savvy one of the most complex skills there is when you're walking your dog when he sees another dog he doesn't know how does he know instantaneously whether he should look at that dog or not whether he can approach that dog or not that a well-socialized dog can tell that in a flash and they know whether to go still and just look away so the other way i look at it is how can we prove it well if we did a genetical breeding study it would take 20 years it would take now a lot of gene sequencing stuff and probably cost a few hundred million dollars well that ain't gonna happen however how quickly can we do a study on training um very quickly as opposed to studies say on cognition they take forever and your effects require very sophisticated statistics if i did a study on training and my favorite studies of what i call test train test you're going to tr have this dog for 25 minutes so i test his comprehension on say verbal commands sit down sit stand down stand five times over verbal commands only if the dog doesn't sit i repeat the command i repeat it to a maximum of five times if he doesn't sit i then lure him to sit and carry on with the next one which is down okay so that's my test sit down set stand down stand verbal commands only multicommands at commands if necessary then i calculate what i call the response reliability percentage so if i repeat it five times for each sit from the stand i've got five repetitions five responses divided by how many commands did i give well i'm only scoring up to six five verbals in the lure and i come out with a percentage well a a lady who's starting one of these studies in england you said i got a dog he won't do anything what do we do i said okay here's the protocol you say sit five times no response you try to lure him no response he has a score of six but zero responses now you physically move him into the sit for the next position so we go on but you're getting a score of zero response reliability brilliant because this is the pre-test

imagine now what just 20 minutes lure reward training is going to do to this dog i can improve that from zero to about 70 percent in 20 minutes and so when we're doing research on training the effects are enormous a dog that won't let go of a retrieval toy we can change that in one session you know but this is the research that's not being done instead people will talk about oh well is it this gene is it bred into the dark was it his grandfather or that we should do a study on this or studies on cognition in learning my view is it'll take forever or cost a fortune and your p p-values won't exist because you need sophisticated statistics i'm going to produce data in 20 minutes by just training six dogs that my p-values will be 0.01 so if i graph out the histogram scores of the pre-test and the post-test the same test before and after training you will see daylight between the two bell curves we don't need to do statistics on this to know that the p-value is going to be 0.01 it's going to be so significant this is the training that i so wanted trainers to do and it's why i started the apdt foundation to raise money to give as prizes to trainers that have done research on dog training because at the moment what i find in the doggy world in the training world so many people are proselytizing it like it like i am now i don't want to listen to that i want to see you doing it so what i've been doing the last two years is filming me training and i'm now changing careers into an editor now what you will see is one minute before one minute after a dog playing with that same dog in a dog park with hundreds of dogs around but you can also see real time training of how long it took me and with that dog it was about two hours and three sessions that is a dramatic change so you know i want people to see the data before and after and if you're interested in that you want to know how i did it here is the real-time training with no edit and so you know instead what we're getting say the foundation is giving grants to people to do studies in universities where half of the money goes to the university and they're doing the wrong studies they're all on cognition i don't want that i want studies on training so that we know when we see this video we see these data we see this video saying i really want to see how this guy did it yeah you know who to listen to so like that's gone you see in your world you have that it's called competing correct and when i got into this field every single person at my seminars was competing in obedience a few of them in tracking a few very few in shirts and so on but they all competed and they know what an nq is they know what a

zero is and because of that we maintain standards before going out in public in the trial or in the pet dog sense before walking on the street but now people you know they they won't test the dogs i've tried to get people to do it in class and they say oh no what if my students fail and i tell my trainers then i'll fire you if your students fail i mean that's obviously a reflection on on the teacher i was joking of course but i think it's the best way to learn when we test everybody's students and now we know two things you know how good you are training dogs and how good you are teaching people because i find a lot of dog trainers don't have stellar people skills in fact the opposite they're very disparaging of their clients you shouldn't have got a dog you never should do that that's inhumane and no my question is can you train the dog prove it and when i've seen that a person can cause behavior change in a dog then i will listen to them and watch them and then we can have a meaningful conversation about the techniques you used and i'm not the sort of person to say i don't like that technique you're a horrible person i would say you know another way of doing it is this should we try that and see which is quicker and easier and more effective then we evaluate what's enjoyable or not but i find many trainers make value judgments on others without and if you think about it now at workshops or conferences when did you last see someone train a dog on stage see this was the way the ap apdt used to be up until 1999 in san diego when we had 1500 people at the conference and the presenters were all training dogs on stage dogs from the audience and i love that i mean one of my favorite people to watch with you ever seen her on stage sue sternberg she was hilarious i think it was san diego where she's teaching dogs to retrieve so says well i don't have a demo dog because i've come from the east coast so i'll pick three dogs from the audience and she picked something like a beagle a husky and an irish wolfhound to train real time on stage it was so hilarious because she has a bag which treats it on the floor with the beagles in the bag so she puts bag on the table so the shirt her fulfill runs off with it the whole thing was just funny yeah but in the end she had three dogs that would retrieve on cue that's a trainer you kind of started something that i i want to come back to this to where um the the whole problem of which is a it's a very big problem the divide between the dog training camps and which way is better and which one is it's um not not a good way to do and i wish that we can find way that we can train

compete and see what works the best for the dog which dog is happy which dog is comfortable which dog like like it's it's not that hard for us to work together but somehow there is a big divide in the community of dog training and we all have i mean i have my my own theories of why this is again i mean i've been training those for quite some time and i come from eastern europe we used to train dogs i'm sure you train dogs the same old school way at one point where you know you use deletion jerk and release and and and so on and it was a it was how it was done then the 80s came and then people got excited that wow we can actually don't need to always do this kind of training we actually can make the dog enjoy the training and make the trainer enjoy the training um eventually some of the books came karen pryor's book came um you know and and it started to change on a big scale what we can do and i think a lot of trainers including myself i i mean i went all the way with it and i i was training pretty much without any use of aversif at one point but in the competitions that i compete in it was it was a limitation like i and not just myself but i i would see that limitation of okay we can definitely we know that we can train a dog but if we have some element of negative reinforcement the training can become a level or two higher and the negative reinforcement especially for the sports that i do comes very important because we have to deal with competitive reinforcers on the field and it's not possible to always control the environment it's not possible to always use negative punishment it's not possible okay i wouldn't say it's not possible it is possible but it is very time consuming and it's not as as effective as some instances and i always i like i am i anything that comes out anything that's new anything that sold from early 80s to today anything that's of importance in dog training i have studied it to to one level that i understand what what is going on and anything that i see that works i would of course take a news no question about it and i believe that many trainers will do the same and this is where what what you were saying like we you we will have um somebody will give a seminar or some some study is gonna come out and we're gonna say well this is you know this works better than this but then if you don't present that and

you don't show us how to do it and or if you if if you show me how to do it and i am doing it but i am not successful then i will should be able to come back to you and and learn a better way and this is my question when we always say that there is a better way but we are not out there promoting that better way and not proving and not proving that it is a better way and i think this will always change the dog training world i don't think i think it's this side of just clashing and not working together and always saying well our way is better no our way is better but what is your way what exactly just show me what you can do because if your way is better i have no ego i'm taking it all and i'm using it all if it's better there's no question in my head that i wouldn't do it right and so i have um i don't understand why this is um when when we are saying there is a better one that is but it's actually not explained and then we don't have the tools or the understanding how to deal with it and it is different to have a dog that's doing competitive obedience than a dog that is doing a protection sport and it's bred for that and it has an element of aggression and in a whole different chemicals that work at that moment and it has to listen at that time i think it's very it's to on my opinion a very high level of training only if you are able not to just squash a dog because that that's easy to do everybody can do that but actually to be find a way to control and guide a dog that it's in that high level of arousal and as i said all those chemicals are just at work in a madness and the dog really wants to do something that you are asking him to do something else but finding the way for the dog to do what you want while they really want to do something else without showing that avoidance and suppression and and you know just pure compliance with eagerness without the without the i'm doing it just because i'm afraid that you're gonna jump on me i'm not interested in that kind of training yeah i mean it's like people too that view is like in our company my son runs it now um we've never had an argument um does he do everything i want no he's in charge of the company now he makes decisions and sometimes i totally disagree we you know there's and so it comes into conflict i want this done but it's not being done but i'm not going to argue about it i say well let's do both and see which one works better but back to the dog training thing the way i see it because i i look back you know pretty much to the 60s about this and i never trained the formal way i'd never seen it until i saw barbara woodhouse on the telly and i thought i don't know what keys

no i thought it was a joke i thought it was a comedy program you know i saw it in a pub i grew up on a farm my dogs are off leash and when i walked into my first obedience trial my dog was six months and one day old i had to borrow a leash i didn't even own a leash i didn't i didn't think about it that in novice you've got a heel on leash as one of the exercises you know as i had to borrow someone's leash and so i always trained off leash and was very comfortable with it but anyway the way i see the whole dog world and when i look back i i do so with an incredible amount of joy when i think you know the privilege i've had to be here at this time the wonderful people i've met and watched but i also look back with a lot of sadness because i think i saw the peak in dog training in terms of coming together and people learning quickly was like the end of the 90s the beginning of the new millennium and so when i started the apdt um first in canada then the us uk never worked because they wanted to exclude everybody there the dog people are very exclusionary um but then you know australia new zealand japan and so on it was an open educational organization now if you're educating people who do you want to educate the most the professors no they know a lot you want to educate the people who haven't got it and haven't had the privilege to know what you know so we welcomed anybody no matter how you trained a dog come and learn these methods and we do the demos on the stage um there are tremendous togetherness at the conferences you talk to everybody the the the evenings were just so much fun it was ridiculous doesn't exist now just does not exist we used to have balls and dances and then pop nights and um you know it was skits we would put on it was a fun place to be um now it's not so much i wonder if the internet has something to do with how things changed it happened it started to happen in the 2000s and it had to do with becoming theorists and i'm i'm sad to say i was the first person to introduce learning theory to doc training um a friend of mine said you should call it learning secrets because it is a secret to most people so we brought in a bit of science but this is meant to aid the practice of dog training not meant to be something you argue about in lieu of actually training the dog which has happened online i see many discussions about well which part of the quadrant do you in and all this stuff rather than how can we use our learning theory our learning theory not the one people have focused on because that's over 50 years old it's 50 to 100 years old the learning theory everyone is treating as gospel creedal

it's like it's in a little red book oh no no no this is negative punishment or well this is positive reinforcement and it was meant to be refined and but the point was we put it on show not just at the conference but i i put on what's called the canine games an event um where we had eight teams nine dogs and handlers on each team and all the competitions nine of them were off leash this is it this is the final performance and it was so wild like we used to hold it in the sky dome in toronto you know 30 000 people there and we did it with the credit valley dog show because they were losing supporters so i said well i put on the canine games if we can get more people to come well the noise we were creating we got music playing blaring 30 000 people shouting and screaming the people in obedience came over and said could you keep it down that dogs are spooking i said well as um look at this team all the handlers are less than 10 and they've got their dogs under control off leash you know this to me was the great equalizer because then you knew you wanted to listen and watch these people and learn from them but that has gone there are no competitions and i think in part i feel responsible for it going the way it did i didn't notice what was happening again the rift coming back the tremendous animosity and hatred and the apdt even changed from an open educational group to being exclusionary no like it was in england when i tried to start in england i got 500 names who wanted an apdt in england so i gave it to a good friend of mine i won't mention his name and he started handling it first thing he did was took these 500 names and deleted 430 of them and said well they can't join we'll pick these 70 of which seven said i want to be along to this association where you're throwing out people before we start and the apdt in the uk took about 20 years before it built up to the 500 number that i gave them back in 1994 you know and this whole exclusionary thing no we you will never change someone from excluding them from your tribe as one totally positive dog trainer calls it go and join another tribe no if you care about dogs at all dog trainers are precious and the way i explain it to people when i'm talking to a dog owner if you see me do it you won't believe how i'm turned into the nicest person there is i'm nodding i'm smiling i'm trying to seduce this dog owner to do it my way i've got lots of tricks of the trade that i learned from the bozo game to convince them to give it a whirl but when i talk to it why because i don't want to deny their dog my education and if i belittle this owner they aren't going to do what i suggest

so i think their dog suffers and that's my fault but when i'm talking to a dog trainer i'm talking about ruining the life of two thousand dogs because i don't have the people savvy and kindness and empathy to talk to another person just because they're doing it differently from me it's like people that get pissed off because you vote the wrong way or you belong to the wrong religion right you know i like talking to people with different beliefs and learning from it and i will be totally civil and that's not because i'm english it's because i am who i am let's chat about it and learn so we stopped a lot of people learning because we wouldn't allow them to come in but we then stalled ourselves learning because the whole the theory between behind clicker training or positive dog training hasn't changed in the last 20 years whereas what we're doing at sirius changes every year i mean we use techniques now that say are so fast for dog dog reactivity you know you say i'm gonna click away for three months are you kidding me i'm gonna give this dog its life back again today let's let him off leash and go for it because i've convinced myself it's safe i'm not cavalier i wouldn't do it if i think the dog was going to chew another dog up but just the growly wowlers and the fights and all that the argy barges no let's stop that and teach this dog how to wrap around other dogs so we can get him back in the dog park again off leash that's what being a dog is sniffing bums running with other dogs i mean that's what they should be doing not unleash being held fearfully by the owner so you know i'm a great believer and can we do it in one session and i i think a lot of trainers got stalled half were prevented from learning and joining the reward-based ship if you like you're no longer welcome because she tools you use and those that stayed stopped learning and forgot that as i tell people we don't bicycle to the moon we used to walk we discovered horses then bikes motorcycles cars planes now we have rocket ships you know there's a thing called advances in technology and it's happened in dog training but i find now you know fewer people are saying listening to me if i told them oh i would use a dr 10 20 30 on that you want to speed up a bassett's recall you'll have the fastest basset on this planet you've got to use a differential reinforcement that has four levels of feedback and it changes according to the quality of the behavior with every response we recalculate obviously that can be done with an iphone app but i have a simple formula that allows you to do it five reps at a time then you recalculate but you will speed up

any dog's recall so it's the fastest dog on the planet okay when we actually did train up a basset and he was competing in the canine games where you had 64 dogs start they race one against the other two dogs at a time and the winning dog that sits across the finish line goes through to the next round and we had a basset that got into the quarterfinals basset and in one of the preliminary rounds it knocked out a border collie because the owner thought oh i'm drawn against the basset oh my god what a joke it was already setting up and they forget how strong bassets are they don't push from the back like say shepherds or malinois they pull from the front and that basset was over the line before the border collie owner had even realized what had happened but then the next owner up against the bassette knew what they were up against and he got knocked out the quarterfinals but you know that's what we need to do change behavior quickly when you look at my criteria for training it's got to be easy perhaps the owners can't do it the owner's not you they have 40 years experience they're not champion of the world they're an owner but they bought a malinois you know and so it's got to be easy or else they can't do it it's got to be quick or else they probably won't dogs aren't their life it's equivalent to a vcr to them turn it on turn it off and the sooner we as trainers get used to that instead of holier than vowing them then you shouldn't have got a dog the quicker we can help people out it's got to be effective sounds dumb right no not if you count least jerks and you count electric shocks or you count food treats week by week and what you find is they don't change well if they don't change it's presumably because the behavior hasn't changed over here the behavior hasn't decreased in frequency to zero over here it hasn't improved to a hundred yet you're still shocking jerking or treating at the same frequency well isn't that evidence to you that this ain't working what you're calling a punishment or a reward isn't a punishment or a reward you know that's why quantification is so important it's why i play games because it is the most ruthless qualification there is you know as in the old obedience trials or walking dog trials of gun dog trials or tracking or what what have you and so i competed the canine games for people and when you have 64 dogs how many first place dogs will there be one the fastest dog in the tournament there'll be a silver medal there'll be a bronze medal that is ruthless quantification and that's what we need back in dog training but not so much ruthless my dog versus yours but you and your dog

versus you and your dog what's your personal best you'll only know if you count for time and then when you put you you best your personal best that's the time for you and your dog to celebrate you know they know you're working for a team and i've met some dogs here when you were talking about competing but i am convinced that these dogs actually got the thrill out of the competition this was an obedience though that not only were they trained what to do but they had the thrill of doing a good job it was obvious to me that the the the owner who at the time was the best trainer in the u.s and then became one of my puppy trainers susie blooper um oh it was honestly the best training in the us but she had the highest ranking archdoc let's put it that way with the most number of points and that dog you could see him he loved healing properly he took pride in it he was showing behaviors that she wasn't asking him for it's like if dogs have pride i don't know but he seemed proud of his owner and proud of his performance and i say it's it's the holy grail of positive or reward-based dog training is you don't use any external reinforcers at all the response becomes the reward for the dog doing it is sufficient and you see this a lot in when once you get the bike work say in should send they will go at that with more verve than they will with the obedience or say the tracking and back when i i used to counsel some shits and trainers back when and um so i looked at point spreads in the three disciplines bite work you've got a tiniest point spread between the top 10 dogs in bite works like that and tracking like that and obedience it was colossal so if you just make sure you first compete in novice kennel club obedience you will kill schutzer and obedience this was back then not so much now who is going to make up that point spread even if they come first in bike work and first in tracking mathematically they can't you know it's very different now obedience is a big thing in ships of now but back then 40 years ago it wasn't the obedience was totally sloppy and so it makes it a winnable sport with not the best dog it's kind of like our elections in the states yeah um it's we've got to get back to people doing it and and this is where um years ago in the 90s i went to the akc and said the novice exam in the akc is the best exam for a companion dog it's wonderful quick sits one command solid rock solid stays walked by your side on a loosely hello why don't you just change it and offer this same exam but people can talk to the dog the whole way through and that you know this one command only thing ruined what could have been i think the most

fun attractive sport out there because it's a very well designed test which has been copied in many other doc sports and even if you like between exercises offer a treat or throw a tennis ball or plate tub for owners and instead know this whole thing you only give one command you can't praise i mean it's how to make a misery out of something that's enjoyable it's like oh we have a difficult exercise here dog training i want you to make it really unenjoyable that was akc obedience why didn't they change the world you know and have a like pre-novice where you could talk to the dog i mean they do have a pre-novice of sorts but you can talk to the dog all the time because that's what a pet owner wants and you can give treats you have 10 treats say per trial and the whole dog world would be different then because we have to people have to do it and and as i tell everybody dog behavior doesn't lie i can look at your dog and your dog bark five times that's a fact why he did it we can argue forever when he's abused when young or he's lonely or he has anxiety now he bark five times solve that problem teach him to shush after one bar behavior is observable and quantifiable testable so we can test what people are saying you know there's too many people blabbing at the moment and not enough people posting videos for what they're doing so what do you think where where would like if we try to at least like i i'm certain that we cannot get everybody together there is there was always gonna be extreme on each side that they will not want to ever agree or listen to anything different than what the their ideology tells them to but i also know that all those the majority of dog training and people that love dogs they don't necessarily want to be in these extreme places and they want to do the best they can for their dogs and in my opinion the best for a dog is whatever the best for that dog is and it shouldn't be based on uh um ideology or or if if we try something and it may work with 50 dogs but it doesn't work without dog do we not want to try something else that maybe has a chance to and how do we how do we get everybody because if we all start to train dogs together and actually share ideas instead of just saying no my way is better than your way and your way is better but we actually start sharing ideas and we have some competitions to where it's really as you said it's like no we can we can prove this it's easy you watch it you know it's not i don't listen to i want to see it there's gotta be a way that we can get back to making dog training exciting because there is a lot that we can learn from from everywhere yeah i mean i i think the k9 games was

one of the best ideas i ever had but i had a stupid business model and every year i did it in a different city so i started in san francisco moved to l.a then to washington dc then to chicago then to toronto now when i was in toronto we stayed there for four years um but i was only doing one event so i never developed an audience you know the only place where it happens regularly is japan where it's an annual event they have a league there and then an annual playoff because it is the most hilarious three days i've ever seen in my life you know we have nine games which all improve the dogs value as a companion and improve its quality of life so like in the wolf relay you have five dogs each dog has to bark three times and shush if he barks a fourth time the whole team's disqualified five dogs have to do it the world record is 7.2 seconds pretty good eh yeah and so and my favorite event it was dancers with dogs and the in the event description it says you have two minutes to complete your performance no you have 30 minutes 30 seconds to set up you have two minutes to complete your performance that's all it says and the things we've had there we've had like drill groups you know seven owners seven dogs we had a guy came on dressed as an accountant carrying a briefcase with his dog a colleague wearing seven veils and the music starts and he strips and dances with his dog you know we've had plays we've had humor it's amazing what people come up with when you just say you've got two minutes do it but i i have a list right here actually things i tried and succeeded in and a list of things i tried and failed and so things i've tried and failed canine games my fault i should have had it in san francisco and kept it there every year building up to where it's grossing a couple of million every year and then it spreads i should have done that maybe in the future um all sorts of things the zero calorie treat this was a puffer that puffed the odor of liver to a dog you had thirty 000 puffs in one tree ideal for vets or groomers handling dogs who want to treat a lot without feeding it you know so i tried all these things and they interested me so what happened there um people didn't get it i tried to sell it and then people said oh you're teasing the dog and like now i would say no i'm not smelling the treats far more rewarding to the dog than actually eating it it's they all sniff it forever and then look it's gone it's heading to the dog's anus already you know and um so you know trying things and like more recently you know people are moaning about this trainer on tv and that so i started a program on an old website called dog style daily

it's still there and it was called america's dog trainer and then world's dog trainer so i wrote to hundreds of trainers and said look i know you don't like what you see on tv here's your chance you have 30 minutes okay to show what you do i couldn't get anyone to do it what i have there i thought i'd do series after series trainers around the world and trainers in the states i think i only got like 10 of each and then i thought well i'll put on puppy pantomimes another failure so a pantomime is a very very english thing at christmas it's a play like cinderella or puss in boots and all the women are played by men and a lot of the all the women are played by men a lot of the men are played by women and you're in fancy costumes it has a lot of famous people doing it like soccer stars and you know motor racers and what politicians and you all take part in the panto at christmas so i had this contest and it had a massive money prize a thousand bucks or something the best video and the theme was something like summer fun and you'll see it's still on dog star daily we we've only posted the top 10 but it was so much fun these people just some of them the top five just went overboard some of the others were pretty dorky but they made you laugh and they were fun and it was people having fun with their dogs and doing stuff that was really cool you know and a couple of the dogs were incredibly well trained um but you know we picked it for not just technical merit but artistic impression like with the you know i think we got to bring those things back and um because when i try stuff like that i'm always too long you know like 20 minutes no one wants to watch a show for 20 minutes they want to watch the dog trainer for one minute then if we had 100 different dog trainers doing the same thing teaching a dog to sit stay you know we've only got one minute okay off you go and it can be real time or fast forward my son does that a lot when i'm training stays you know like i think in one of our serious videos he fast forwards this dog he's not responding to an all-in-one reward training thing to find my face and look at me and he's just sitting looking at my bum and he does this for like three minutes so jamie just fast forwards two and a half minutes then all the dogs said oh that's not your face and he comes around and sits fronts looking at the face you know and this stuff was fun and we i think you know dog training just got such a bad rap in the media and especially on tv and when i look at dog training programs on tv it's like watching grass grow they're formulaic they're boring that's not what dog training is dog training should be rasmitas and fast

and but showing how to do it and showing how the trainer back to what you said about training dogs we need a plan a it needs to be quantified and tested what is the quickest easiest most effective way to teach say a one minute sip stay but for the occasional dog where that doesn't work what's your plan b and your plan c and we must teach owners when things became totally 100 absolutely positive the trainer wasn't teaching the owner what to do if the dog misbehaved or was non-compliant it's all very well saying well turn your back on the dog that jumps up but it's no the owner wants a solution now how about just telling the dog sit and the problem so we have to deal with non-compliance and misbehavior and i find a lot of trainers are not doing that and i would say a lot of arguments in dog training are straw men they aren't actually arguments about dog training at all because often both extremes haven't trained their dog and think how many conferences you've been to let's take say a shot caller conference or a clicker conference where the dogs are wearing shock collars or being clicked at you shouldn't be seeing that in an educational conference so they obviously aren't training tools they're management tools but they obviously aren't there because that shock is not a punishment and that click is not a secondary reinforcer it's being totally misused and these are the people arguing it's not about training we can have a discussion about training because you take certain pride in um certain people like i remember one of my books that dr dunphy's good little dog book that was named after a good friend of mine who sadly died i think last year um martin dealey and when i first saw him train my as it was part of my tv program i'm at a county fair in england he's working in a 40 acre field he takes three dogs from the audience and teaches them to retrieve off leash all of them just using his voice and the tennis ball and my producer says to me you're crying ian what's wrong and i just said this is just so beautiful to watch this guy's training three dogs off leash just with praise and a tennis ball it's it's magical you know and we can take joy in other people doing it and doing it well and we can take joy in a final performance but we must see and evaluate and quantify the final performance before we can argue about methods right because what is the bigger abuse and kelly i think you got the wrong dumbbell for this interview it should have been kelly she's the male and white person but there you go she's always said what is greater more abusive in a dog to solve the problem quickly using something that could be a little scary or physically painful

or not solve the problem and live with it giving the dog grief every day even if you're just in a huff denying the dog your joy and companionship because you haven't trained the dog and so you know i don't like these straw man arguments about training when the dogs haven't been trained i want to see proof of training and the good old day was cool man i learned you know i was a doggy expert before i competed and i never actually competed i partook of obedience i was not a competitor i was in there with a malamute right the third time in the ring i learned what it was about i went in the ring six months one day six months two days partly just flew by thought this is easy then we failed the downstay and i thought ah this is an interesting problem what do i do if my dog breaks a stay when he's 35 feet away but i'm not allowed to talk to him or signal him and it challenged my brain and i worked it out and so i continued then lecturing to you know competitive people you know because i learned things like get the problem out of the pattern so let's say you have a problem with the dog holding a retrieval object or a sleeve in his jaws and he's got problems like he's munching on it keeps re-gripping i would say don't solve this problem in the pattern you're doing you know in competitive obedience get it out you've got to do it with toys and you do it in your living room you're sitting down and it's off take it hold it good dog thank you he held it for one second now build it up to two then three and four and five then do it with every object in the living room your car keys your wallet uh a cushion a toy squeaky toys that's a hard one to hold and not squeak then you've got it take the object perfectly and hold it but don't do that retraining in the pattern because the dog makes a mistake you get frustrated that phrase straight frustration poisons the pattern and then you have a dog whose head goes down and you say let's compete he's like no because she'll only get mad at me you know because you know some people in obedience and a lot of the working sport you're dealing with the most sensitive breeds out there it's like i've seen dogs where the owner just said and that dog goes flat well number one let's socialize in getting used to your moods because you're obviously a moody testy person so we want a dog that doesn't give a damn that when you go you son of a [ __ ] the dog just says don't confuse me for someone that gives a damn now what would the exercise you know very very interesting yes that's that's uh like um you did talk to you you were at the the last um conference with the iicp i think right the what did you think of that it was like

going back in time i've never had so much fun in my life there would you know i couldn't do too much drinking these days now but the partying and the dancing till two in the morning and you i talked to everyone nice because i was kind of a black chick coming in but sadly i did it um because of martin deeley because when i got there he already died so i went down there five days expected to spend them with my old buddy and i was pretty much on my own because i went on my own but um yeah it's anyone who's training a dog i like to look at what they do see i'm not the dog trainer in the family you know that's like you know kelly my former wife or my girlfriend now they train dogs they put in the time they work with it what i'm good at is watching observing quantifying and then saying here's your problem just change this you'll find it's different within the realms of the techniques they use so god on facebook people went ape [ __ ] when i mentioned this that i just mentioned something like petco had taken shot collars off the shelves oh my god the abuse i got because um i said personally i've never used a shock collar i never will because i don't like electricity and i don't know when the dog feels it the same as i do but i know what happens when i feel it and i wet my pants you know and i said however i've given many lectures on how best to use them and they just went crazy and so i had to explain afterwards i said because most shocks aren't punishments by definition if we shocked a dog for say jumping up well we'd expect him to jump up less therefore we shock him less eventually not to jump up at all therefore we don't shock him at all it's not what we're seeing we're seeing lots of shocks therefore it is not an aversive punishment maybe a little aversive but it's not punishment in the sense of causing the behavior to decrease in frequency and so that's where and i'd do the same with someone with a clicker i would say oh my god you're clicking like a maniac refine your criteria you should only be clicking one out of three approximations to the behavior otherwise you won't improve in quality quickly enough you know and same i feel the same about punishments if you use them you shouldn't be using them again otherwise you haven't trained the dog and why it was there so let's go back and rethink that problem and then there's many little things that you can change you know to make that better like oh you know in the heavy duty competition world i'd say let's get really unbelievable impulse control on a dog over stupid games first because it doesn't matter if you screw up here but when you say sit stay i want that dog to be not just solid as a rock

but relaxed as a rock because he knows there's no way you will release him until certain things happen what i call these combination unlocking cues like for example um you know in competitive obedience when you're doing the stage and they say back to your dog and they say release your dog most people before they release their dog they heal one step forward so the judge says exercise finish release your dog well instead of saying free dog they go heel one step sit free dog i did something slightly different which no one ever saw i would go back to my dog and take one step backwards and heal so in any stay my dog knew unless he does a one-step heal backwards he's never going to say hang loose and this was my hand signal which my hand would never do by accident you know and so that to me is the joy of training watching someone and making what they do better because i'm good at seeing glitches you know i don't have the patience to put in all my training now is done in 25 minutes and i'm filming it because i want you to see what the dog was like here what he's like now 25 minutes later sometimes one session only sometimes three i i think that's a great idea i think um for the most part a lot of trainers are just stuck in this endless repetitions and drills that are completely disregard dog's intelligence and and and don't think that the doc can actually grasp some concept in a very brief interaction and dogs dogs are so capable of this and actually makes it the whole interaction and training and learning makes it so much more interesting for a dog when you stimulate that little brain in the way that something needs to happen like right now we don't need five weeks to to learn something that can be taught and practiced within minutes and i know i'm it's very nice to hear that you know that's a it's a very very good um approach and and i think in every almost every every dog sport every kind of dog training there is this idea that we have to keep repeating and build this uh muscle memory and and just like they're they're just not smart enough to understand what we want so we need to just keep going forever and ever and ever and the dogs get bored and they lose motivation and they're like okay this is just the most boring time training really has you know slowed down it used to be the old way remember wait till they're a year old put them on lease and keep going to class for three years then hopefully you'll get one leg in novice or something like that um but we speeded it up with luring then it started to slow down as it lost its voice you know it lost instruction then it lost praise it was placed by clickers um and it really slowed down to a

standstill of getting stuff done and so you know i i love it when you know we really now accelerate the training process and so i now do it by trial and so i tell people you know by the eighth trial so when i'm working with any dog here here's what i do i say hello dog here's a treat i step back say dog come treat then step back dog come sit treat and i step back dog come sit down sit stand down stand the fourth trial so i've done four trials the dog's got four food rewards given me 10 behaviors come come sit come sit down sit sorry come sit down stand sit down how did i make it ten behaviors then well they have the original come yeah come sit down sit stand downstairs yeah so ten behaviors for four treats in four trials now i do four more trials same as trial four i step back come sit down sit stand down stand come sit down sit stand down stand four trials now so after eight trials the last four trials gave me 28 behaviors okay for four treats so i'm looking at the response treat ratio okay how many responses i get for a single tree and then i put the food in my pocket step back and say come here sit with my empty hand and they come and sit and i phased out the lure by trial nine is the first session trial nine that food is out of my hand think now though all the people that use food as a lure how long does it take them to phase it out of their hand never they're bribing the dog about it and that's why speed is such an important thing to to measure because you know i really get owners i always used to say that you know i tried to devise training techniques that were dog friendly but now i try to design techniques which are people friendly and dog friendly because i get it with people they want it done yesterday they don't want you to tell them they shouldn't have got a dog or this will take forever or you've got to be patient and consistent they don't want to know that they want a training technique where they can get it done in a few minutes and might be inconsistent and that's what we have to deliver and that's what we have to creatively so how the hell can we do that then without compromising the dog's behavior at other times that's very simple we have you know multiple names for the dog for one i give suggestions like hey huge baby come here it means a suggestion like a stop sign in florida you know and uh you don't have to do it but most of the time the dogs do but if i said hugo lewis sit or in his case it would be hugo louis asi it would also be in french he knows that is not a suggestion that they must do and we can whisper that command ukulele asi because he knows i will follow up because i called him hugo louis

it's a must do and the interesting thing when you follow up you don't even have to raise your voice if you just follow up until the dog does it and then when he does it so let's say i had to ask him five times before he eventually sat but when he does it eventually i say thank you now he has to repeat the whole exercise come here sit and he has to keep doing that until he does it on a single command because people are hung up about that never due to repeat the command i don't give a [ __ ] if i repeat it ten times if i have to repeat the command you repeat the exercise did you do it following a single command and the dogs learn when he calls from hugo louis i have to do it on one command no matter how many times i repeat it sometimes i'll do it on the first command you know it's so simple when you think about it and how did i learn this that's how my grandpa and my dad train me train me they would ask me once they never shouted never hit me ever i did it man they said ian shush i was quiet we had certain respect back then but without raising the voice that i think that's wonderful you know with dogs and with family because we can now communicate when it's a deal breaker if i use a different name like yeah the kids do all the time you know johnny johnny don't touch johnny put that down you know juan carlos so not only do they change from informal name to formal name but they change languages and johnny does it immediately now sadly he's doing immediately because he's likely been smacked around the back of the head you don't have to you just have to follow up and they they just learn food seems to be a a big part of of the reinforcer or reward that you use do you do you move into because it's a good starter yeah you see owners can't use affect they can't use tone um i love being silly and i'll like talk to the doctor are you doing a good dog now [ __ ] and the dog will do it or i use air treats that's my favorite and i go off off off and then i say take it and the dogs go and just eat this pretend you know but people can't do that so a food lure gets it done quickly teaches the meaning of words in the quickest way possible via hand signals and a food reward is that short-term starter reward because you couldn't praise a dead cabbage you know they can't praise they can't say thank you the knee-jerk human foible is to ignore the good and punish the bad [ __ ] at the bed all the dog does that's wonderful we totally ignore it then he barks once we get over his case same with kids same with spouses same with pupils same with employees you know and and so the food goes straight to the dog's brain and motivates them from an owner who is like sir

sir or they do here's their hand signal this will be funny because i'm being i'm on camera instead of going over sit upwards in front of their nose they go sit sit sit well you can't sit they're pointing at the dog's butt over his head but he doesn't have an eye on the back of his head and you know he doesn't have the cognitive wherewithal that pointing down means you want his butt down instead you get the nose to follow up just like a horse lead it by the nose the rest of the body will follow so it's only to start them off but we phase it out in the very first session food as a lure it's on the table i won't let them have it in their hand i won't let them have it on their purse and say food bags on the table middle of the room there's your distraction you have to call the dog away from it or get the dog to sit and look at you when that happens you say good dog go and get a bit out of your food bank and give to the dog so we use the food initially as a lure then as a distraction and as a reward but we're always playing games to see how many responses we can get for a single food reward like how many puppy push-ups till he fails so what do you what would you do to increase motivation if uh i mean certain dogs would have really crazy food drive and some dogs would not be so and especially when you have a person that can get excited and can get motivated enough how do you where do you go we use rewards like most people have never even thought of so just very quickly because we're approaching two hours yeah i know i know so very quickly i use the food because the novice owners need it but we quantify phasing it out we go cold turkey on the lure and the food then becomes a reward only but it's at a distance as a distraction so that can be done a number of ways either a friend of yours is holding it so if you say good dog because the dog's sitting and looking at you whenever you say good dog they will give the dog a food reward but we're always building how many responses how many heel sit sequences for a single treat how many comes it sequences in a row say 25 one step sequences comes it comes that comes in across the room for one treat at the end so we're always increasing the response reward ratio but then the easiest way to fade out phase out of food and if the dog doesn't like food you train the dog to like food it's no different than a dog that doesn't like children you train it to like children you know by following food by something the dog likes like what off take it with a bit of kibble chest scratch off take the bitter kibble on the couch off take the bit of kibble throw a tennis ball so now that bit of kibble you think

about it it's not like a clicker which is only a secondary reinforcer for a tree the kibble in my book is a secondary enforcer for everything remotely enjoyable for this dog because he has to come and sit and take a bit of miserable kibble i don't use treats at all i don't it's just it's junk food you know you eat the kibble and that could mean what's coming next could be fetch tug jazz up settle down tag that means i allow you to run away and i chase you on the couch chess rub sniffing another dog's butt you know it's all followed by taking the kibble sitting sitting looking at me taking the kibble then we play the interactive games fetch and tug tugs my favorite because the tugs next to you and it means nothing to other dogs in the dog park so you throw one tennis ball when you could have a hold up but tug only means something to my dog and again the tug is a mega secondary sit take the tug hold it don't pull yet and then thank you and a chest rub instead occasionally sit hold the tuck and pull on it okay when you get the cue so the tug is a secondary that you know so means a lot to the dog so the interactive rewards then i look at what's really reinforcing to the dog most people classify these things and activities as behavior problems sniffing sniffing a dog's butt pulling on leash from my malamute that solved forging on healing in one session when i put pulling on leash on cue and if he healed i would say pull okay and i was a sledder you know i was a member of the norcal malamute you know club and cross-country skiing i've got a malamute for me uphill now it was brilliant so it could be the dark lights running away you know we ever watch dogs play what do they do they run up to a dog and jump on it and they turn around and run off want to be chased so we play tag off take it you take the tag toy when i tap you on the head you run i chase periodically i say overcome to continue the game you have to come and sit or i just say finish and walk off they learn that very quickly so you get quick recalls but the reward is you can run away and i would chase you jazz up settle down put craziness on cue all dogs need it they're locked up in an apartment so we go jazz up settle jazz up settle just up settle before you know it you got the quickest settle in the world so you know and once you get to the the working world it's inevitably their sport you actually start off as i say a winner there because you know what the dog's gonna love doing you like biting the sleeve or the full body suit depending on which sport you're playing you know or or running and doing hurdles you know going over the palisade um that you already know when you teach the

dog how to play these games the games will be absolutely self-reinforcing and we know that from how hard it is for novice trainers to hold the dog back from any bite work the dogs are barely in control okay so the control and the impulse control i would have taught from other games that don't involve the dog's jewels so this dog is when you say chill man he's chill i love to see i love to see a violent competitive dog about violence i don't mean aggressive i mean a dog that's really into competition but one word from the owner chill i once had a guy come to me um like a seminar in seattle and he was there early and i was talking to him he was having a sandwich his breakfast and i said oh you're in the workshop said yeah i said where's your dog says up there his malinois had climbed a tree and was lying over a branch like a lion i said it's funny so he says oh you want to see him call him down gave me a little demo then he says chill and the dog just dropped like a rag dog i mean it was impressive it's wonderful but to try how do we train him to drop like a rag doll by giving him what he wants to do you must use the problem as the reward in training or you won't get anywhere and in the companion world it's pulling on leafs and sniffing another dog's butt you've got to use that as your reward for sitting and looking at you so like when you like just i i know we need to wrap up but when i just remember to ask like when we talk pulling on leash and talking pet dogs what is what is your take on on the no pull harnesses that are becoming popular right now um well if people know how to use them as a training tool to solve the problem in a couple of weeks and then they're no longer necessary cool but it's not how they're used so if we let's i'll talk about two different tools now say a shop caller and a gentle leader what do owners do with them that is too stupid for words they get it out the package from amazon put it on the dog and use it right away and in one trial they've ruined it as the training tool because the dog has learned you can't run off with this collar on or you can't pull with this you know halter on what you should do is put them on let the dog wear it for two weeks and still misbehave then what you do is you add in another cue and it can either be a verbal cue a formal name for the dog now i like a scent cue on the dog's collar so what i do is i rub the dog's leather flat collar with mink oil with one drop of perfume in it any perfume will do it's unique to the dog so you let the dog sniff the collar and put it on say wow collar smells totally different today whatever and then instead of now the dog going off on his flat collar

but wearing a halter or a shot collar that's not functioning for a week so he gets used to it i don't know what it is but it doesn't do much the day you put on the scented flat collar you connect up or you hold the controller for the shock collar it's the same principle no matter what the tool is and a couple of whoa you can't run off with this on this smelly collar because now the dog think the only difference the dog's thinking what's different i could always run off i could always pull on leash what's different is this smell so now you do that for a month okay and now you'll find now the dog's not running off or pulling so now we let the dog wear the shop collar and let the dog wear the gentle leader but it's not connected anymore he's on the flat or he's off leash and you find now you've got the control yeah and so now we take off the various tools and give it to someone else but people don't know how to use them as i said i've never used a shop car i never would i don't like the idea of shocking dogs and i think that if we're saying well it's the only way to control this dog i say well why don't you get an easier dog maybe the dog is too much for you or sit down and let's have a think tank how can we control this dog in this situation where he's glassy eyed and gone gaga over what he wants to do and we can't get through to him um i would say yeah we can do that with most dogs it of course is easier if you know that you're breeding this dog to compete in obedience or rally or working sports and so you do this stuff early on and get your reliable off-leash dog um so the way we train in serious the dogs are off leash from beginning to end of class and it's silly pet dog training but they're reliable off leash and so now if the owner puts a leash on the dog he walks on at least loose leash because you train him off leash to follow and heal you know you trained him off leash to do six days i mean that that is the big game changer to me when you've trained your puppy off leash when you now go into you want a really good companion at home where you go into some really good dog sports you have such an advantage knowing your dog's reliable off leash you may lose some points but you'll never lose your dog and i i learned that when in the third trial when omaha ran off um he didn't run off he left me when off leash oh no that was the third child it was the fifth trial he leaves me when healing see i'd suddenly as a dog expert learn what competition is got problems to solve so this one i'm healing away with him and he just goes bunny hops twice and walks jumps over the ring through the next ring through the next ring into the fifth ring

where he joins a golden retriever healing with a donut i'm not kidding and so i continue my healing pattern i don't know what to do i'm a novice to to obedience right and i actually had to hop over the ring myself and i say to the judge do i keep walking says no no like this well now everyone at the show including 200 people from the malamute specialty watching me compete are all looking at this malamute off leash in another ring go oh it's a malamute you know and no no stewards will go up to take hold of it so i said to the judge what do i do do i call him back the judge said you could i said oh yeah no problem omaha sit and he sat five rings away and the whole show went quiet so i'm sort of looking around thinking well i failed the off leash yielding but i've got the distance sit down so i've got his attention now so i said omaha come and he comes jumping over the four ring ropes to move through the you know the three rings five rings rather and he sits in front sloppy but he said so i had him finished and he said and the judge is looking at me i remember i remember his name his name was al oh no i've just forgotten it was al someone anyway he put his arm around me and said dr dumbo that was embarrassing i'd lectured at every friggin club right and he said dr dumbo he said you have really amazing off-leash control over your dog apart from when you're healing i said yeah healing problem lately i think he's getting bored with the healing it's just too repetitive but i'm thinking about it he says but he sat five rings away why didn't you tell him to sit before he left the ring i said oh you can't give a second command because it'd been drummed into me you know in the obedience class i was taking you never give a second comment i honestly thought it was a cardinal thing and that the akc could say castrate me if i gave a second command or something but it it's it's kind of stupid if you think about it your dog's running towards a cliff chasing a seagull and say rover sit oh damn i mean so of course you give a second command and it doesn't and i've tested this out over and over it does not delay the dog learning if you train it properly because when i started with zuzu her first time sitting at a distance i gave her 22 commands in a row before she sat now because she her problem was if i said anything she'd run back to me at high speed and sit in front now i wanted to sit at the distance so kelly had her own leash and i'm way off like 35 yards and after 22 commands she sat that's how i started but by the end of that around point isabelle or one command she sat in the distance so when you actually quantify you were like no

you can't unlearn something you haven't learned yet if a dog doesn't know what sit means you know you can't have like um you know an unlearning of that it won't take longer to learn what's it means it doesn't matter and i demonstrate this in workshops i go up to a dog and say down down down down down down down down down down now i'm going to teach the dog what down means rover down lower tree do it again come down good treat come down hand signal tree come down hand signal come down and say calm down no hand signal now the dog does it you know and it's just as quick so so you're you're i think we're on the same page here with uh when you start teaching something you pretty much you you start with giving the cute giving the command you're not waiting for uh yeah yeah i do the same yeah because we're luring and if we know we're gonna lure so we can call the behavior any time then let's not miss the first trial say rover sit lure yes i it's always a little bit strange for me how people are afraid to put a name until the behavior is supposedly perfect and then we name it you can rename it as much as you like i mean i met some obedience um competitors who who would go through 10 names for a command and 20 names for their dog because in the course of training because back then there was a lot of leash jerking and what have you they were poisoning a lot of names and cues so once you've got it build on that and the way you do that is you would be new name old name so you'd say you know uh hugo louis sit well he knows what sit means so that's kind of like a verbal lure so always the new name comes first so the new name doesn't have the poison of the old queue but it has the knowledge of the old cue and so you know no i i with being made me a trainer of pet dogs where i know time is of the essence i can't say i'm gonna wait for a few trials no first trial we use all seven commands you know come sit down sit up stand down stand up and that's seven different responses and we use them on the fourth trial all at once but because we're luring you see when clicker training start there are a lot of people who said oh you mustn't lure when you're shaping it's not pure shaping that was i was under a lot of pressure people were saying luring was wrong i said no booring makes it quick luring enables you to teach hand signals within just half a dozen trials and verbal commands with most breeds within 20 reps and a verbal command is is hard to teach or hard for a dog to learn they they will learn an eye blink a facial expression or a hand signal so fast but actually a verbal command in neutral tone um very very difficult yeah yeah so well look we should wrap

this up my ladder's bursting i need a beer i'm fed up with this water it was so much fun chatting to you thank you you again after many we're gonna put on the below the podcast all the information how people can find you any anything specific with it right now i'm guessing it's the dog the academy right oh i have something you can give them for a nice freebie so dunbar academy it's a subscription site if you give them a secret code which is g g so when they sign up um it will ask them for their credit card payment they enter the coupon code gg they get their first month for free well if they binge watch they can go through one-fifth of the site in one month for free and then they sign off and and their credit card won't be charged so they get a whole one month or three or if they want to stay on it's it's what is it 20 bucks a month or something so the coupon code is g g perfect do you have any book that you're working on new something or you do i just wrote a doc training course and exam and it's a very peculiar course because it's all it's about 200 questions very short questions with short answers so you take the exam first then you read my answers and you take the exam again and then you listen to my answers then you take so you take the exam until it's perfect it's really no different if you think for an obedience competition we know the questions beforehand it's a matter of training the dog to perfection well i think it's a nice way to train people so i train them by answers that was exciting to do and actually designed it for veterans but i realized it's going to be useful for dog trainers because it's stuff that's not written down anywhere else but most exciting uh two weeks ago i started a new book and it's going to be very different it's about nowhere is this stuff written down it's hidden in a lot of my seminars but because you'd have to watch them for days and days to get these little nuggets out so it's a book um about how there's so many things we've been doing wrong for a long time and we're kind of stuck where we are and training should be about always questing for a better way quicker easier more effective more enjoyable and it applies obviously to the teaching of people too so that i'm really excited about jan thank you thank you so much next time we'll talk about my difficulty getting into bulgaria i heard something that's a different conversation we have to leave that one for next time yeah thank you take care thank you so much [Music] you